BlackBerry Storm 9500 hands-on — RIM's a little late to the touchscreen party, but comes bearing goodies. The BlackBerry Storm is a beast of a phone in more ways than one. Fronted by a meaty, high-resolution touchscreen with an innovative clicking mechanism, the phone is easily the prettiest by RIM to date.

BlackBerry Storm First Hands On — The very first time you touch the BlackBerry Storm—RIM's first all-touchscreen keyboard-free smartphone, just announced for Verizon Wireless—you will be startled. No matter how many times your fingers dance on the screen like you've been trained on every other touchscreen, nothing will happen.

BlackBerry Storm hitting TELUS in Canada — Man, we might have to send our runner out to get another carton of cigarettes — this is getting ridiculous! In addition to our leaked embargoed Storm info for Verizon and Vodafone, we're also hitting you with the official press release that TELUS …

Get in the game with AdSense for Games — Do you develop or publish web-based games? If so, you're contributing to a growing trend - according to comScore, over 25% of Internet users play online games every week, which is over 200 million users worldwide.

Technology - the party really is over — On Monday last week I wrote here that the technology party might be over, and that the gloom pervading the financial sector could begin to affect high-tech firms. Since then - gosh, it seems a long time ago - a few things have happened.

Apple dominates the teen vote, but... Teenagers just love their Apple gear as the iPhone and iPod widen their lead among this fickle set. — According to a Piper Jaffray report Apple is dominating teenagers' buying patterns. — The high level details of a survey of 769 teens:

Symantec to buy MessageLabs for $695M — Symantec is acquiring MessageLabs, a maker of online messaging and Web security services, the company said Monday. — The deal is valued at approximately $695 million in cash, with Symantec paying 310 million pounds sterling and $154 million.

Sprint's Xohm Network is Only Half Open — Today marks the formal launch of Sprint's Xohm network, and celebrants are gathered in Baltimore to show off their new WiMAX-enabled gadgets. But after chatting with an executive from Lenovo, I wonder just how open Sprint's network will be …

Time for a calendar revival — Online calendars have been around for more than a decade, and they're tightly integrated with the leading Web mail services used by more than 680 million people per month (as of August, comScore). So it's surprising to see how few people are actually using their Web calendars.

YouTube Launches Ecommerce Platform — Partners with Amazon, iTunes — YouTube has reached agreements with iTunes and Amazon.com to offer users “click-to-buy” links to download music, games and other products. — YouTube says the move is a first step to building a broader ecommerce platform …

Reframe It launches community markup system for Web pages — Here we go again. A new company, Reframe It, is launching its Web markup product on Wednesday. Like ThirdVoice and Stickis before it, Reframe It lets you highlight a piece of a Web page, comment on it, and discuss those comments with other visitors to the site.

Thank you, David (Axmark)! — At the end of the Orlando meeting in January this year when the Sun acquisition was announced, I remember sitting next to MySQL's co-founder David Axmark in the bus going to some evening event. “What do you want to do now, with so many opportunities opening up? …

Times To Shutter IHT Site — The New York Times' Web site is getting more global, and IHT.com is going bye-bye. — The Times told staff in an internal e-mail Tuesday that the paper's flagship Web site will soon become host to news from sister paper the International Herald Tribune and that the Tribune's site will be shuttered.